My thoughts today run towards some lyrics from the song The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers. Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, but the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep. Not sure if I have got that exact or not, and it doesn’t really matter. The point is the same.
My heart was heavy yesterday when I walked through the cemetary at Lyman, Wyoming. Many years ago it was a typical western cemetary filled with a few old graves, scrub brush, and exposed soil. But my great-great grandmother put herself to work with her friend, and beautified the place up so that today it is a grassy place, well cared for, covered with a variety of flowering shrubs.
But what also grows out of that place is a collection of headstones. The bottom third of the central part of the cemetary is filled with primarily three family names, Walker, Bluemel, and Fackrell, all three of them family names on my mom’s side. Extra heavy on my heart was the gravestones with familiar first names belonging to people I have heard about in vivid detail many times, or the names of the people who told me those details.
Today my oldest daughter is hurting over the failing health of a young kitten that she has become attached to. Juxtaposed against yesterday, It left me feeling more than ever that while the best I could hope for was to die in my sleep, the thing I should live for is the best of every moment I am alive. A kitten is a young thing, a lifhat is short so far. Nobody knows when they will go, so to live the best of every moment is so important. Life is a collection of those moments, and why let any of them go by as bad ones if that can be helped? That graveyard represnts both the lives of the people who lie there, and the deaths, in more ways than many other places I have been to. It is a labor of love from Carrie Kemsley Walker, for whome my mother was named. Carrie lays there next to her husband, and they are there with so many of the family from their time. The moments are all gone.
Whenever we go, we go. But till then, may the moments that last be good ones!